


the truth will set you free (but not until it's done with you)

by Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra (Haych_Aych_Ach)



Category: The Truman Show (1998)
Genre: 5+1, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cruelty, F/M, Gaslighting, Gen, Homesickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 07:14:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7967410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haych_Aych_Ach/pseuds/Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Truman missed his hometown, and one time he was very, very glad it was gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the truth will set you free (but not until it's done with you)

_i._

It's only a few weeks after he leaves that he gets the email.

Sylvia had offered to set him up with someone to filter through his emails and his mail, telling him that everyone famous needed someone to sort through the volume and leave off the disturbing stuff, but Truman didn't want anyone deciding what he should and shouldn't read, not ever again. She'd nodded sadly, and helped him set up folders for the read emails to go into: fanmail, sympathetic emails, emails that needed to be reported to the police, guilty emails, legal correspondence, and emails with Sylvia.

(Eventually, emails from Marlon got their own folder. But not until Truman had been free for a year.)

Email is, in general, amazing, and Truman loves the freedom the computers give him. He can look up anything, and there's  _so much_ to find out; pictures of Fiji abound, but he wants to see it for the first time with Sylvia. She's said she wants to go too, once his lawyers have settled the trials.

The email isn't from someone he knows, but Truman opens it anyway that morning over his coffee. He takes it black now, relishing in getting to do something different every morning, reminding himself that no matter what, he's not back there. He's not going back.

_Hey Mr Truman!_

_Well, background: I grew up watching your show, until your dad died, and then my mom cut it off. As a teenager I realized why she did it, and I agreed with her that it was wrong. I joined the Free Truman movement right out of high school, and I've been fundraising for your eventual legal fees and things like that ever since._

_But I only realized today that maybe nobody has told you about this yet: www.trumanshowfactcheck.org. It's a site that someone set up when you were five, I think, and it documents every way in which the Truman Show isn't like real life--from stuff the 'teachers' got wrong in school to how technology is ahead of the show to fashion changes that never made it in. There's also a lot of stuff about times when people broke into the set, or tried to, and inconsistencies between episodes, continuity errors, stuff like that. I think maybe you'd want to know all the things you didn't know?_

_Anyway, let me know if you want anything else. I work in graphic design, mostly, but I can totally do free work for you._

_L.L._

Truman opens the link up carefully in a new tab, and starts to read.

And then he can't stop. So  _many_ things are wrong--from where the moon is to how many countries there are in Africa to how many travel agencies require people to go in in person. He reads it over and over again, clicking on the citations for the real facts, and follows  _those_ links until his head spins. He can't quite deal with it. 

And then he finds the section on 'Fourth Wall Breaks'.

He reads it, and it's not until he gets to the five-hundreth product placement ad that he realizes he's crying. It's not that it happened, it's that he  _never noticed_. Apparently most people don't go on and on about their favorite brand of toilet paper at the grocery store, or only buy their kids one type of lollipop. And then he sees the person who broke in to the show when he was  _five_ , and he has to shut his eyes and take deep breaths, or try to, because he  _remembers it_.

(Not very clearly, and most of what he remembers is being yanked away from the tree and all his presents, mom and dad being upset all day afterwards. He remembers Christmas being ruined.)

And when he thinks about it, he feels humiliated. How many people saw him cheat on math tests, or forget how to spell 'pseudonym', or laughed at his history teacher mixing up the Romans and the Greeks? How stupid  _is_ he?

No wonder Christof thought he'd come back. Over and over again, he'd been fed pure bullshit, and he swallowed it all, each and every drop. 

(And a part of him misses knowing that he was smart.)

 

 

 _ii_.

It's not until about a year after he leaves that he gets anything from Marlon.

His lawyers are still fighting for everything--his wages, mostly, backpay and overtime pay and compensation for emotional damages, hazard pay, pay for how many hours he technically 'worked' as a child--and he's mostly stuck. He doesn't do a lot besides read books and talk to Sylvia nowadays; he does go on walks sometimes with her, at night, disguised with her tricks so nobody recognizes them. They walk or drive to diners and eat greasy food and get  _hammered_. It's great.

But then he gets the first letter from Marlon.

It's accompanied by a hesitant email, telling him he'd sent a letter. Truman opens it, and can't read past the first word for a minute. He ends up pacing his room, reading it slowly, and each sentence is a splinter in his chest, impossible to breathe around without bleeding.

Marlon is sorry. He is very, very sorry, and he's been sorry since he was a kid. He's sorry he lied about being sick and being away at a different school--his parent's didn't  _move away_ for two months, that was vacation--and he's sorry he lied to Truman over and over again, and most especially he's sorry he lied when Truman had started to realize the truth.

Truman sits back and stares at the paper.

It's Marlon's handwriting, of course, he recognizes it. But a part of him can't help but doubt that any of it is real. Most of the actors say they hated working on the set, that Christof was a tyrant and there was immense pressure to be perfect, and getting in and out was a giant hassle. None of them say they really liked him, not his fifth-grade homeroom teacher or his ex-wife or his coworkers. They say he was fake and annoying and too happy.

Is this just a ploy? Is this Marlon just trying to feel better? Did he ever actually feel bad about what he was doing? Is that why he drank all the time?

Truman closes his eyes for a second and wishes, impossibly, that he didn't have to doubt his best friend. He wishes that Marlon could be his friend again, just like when they first met and he would draw pictures with Truman and blow spitballs at the teacher in school, and walk back home together and play stickball. He wishes they could go out to the pier and play golf again, share a beer and trust each other.

 

 

_iii._

As it turns out, his college degree isn't accepted anywhere.

It's not that the academic facts are wrong, really, it's that economics has moved on a lot since he originally took any of it, and apparently the whole thing was carefully tailored so whenever he started to fall behind, the assignments got easier and the professors became nicer. As the spokeswoman for the Higher Learning Organization explains it, "It was a deeply disingenuous fraud, and not a true merited degree by any means."

Several colleges are offering him spots, however, including one that lets him take online classes for the general requirements first, so Truman enrolls and starts off on only four classes: History of Ancient China, Basic Geometry, Literary Analysis, and Introduction to Sociology.

But they're  _hard_. Three of them have reading lists four times the length of the ones he remembers, and the essays keep coming back with tons of comments telling him to improve. Even Basic Geometry seems to move faster than he remembers any class going, and he gets disorganized and ends up only getting a Pass for History of Ancient China.

He tells Sylvia, and she tells him that he just needs to learn better study habits. "I had the same problem in college," she says. "And after I tried to finish my GED, after I got kicked off the show. Seahaven was shit for education. Most of the long-term kid actors there had to study on our vacations. It sucked."

That doesn't quite make him feel better. 

(He wishes he could go back to where he wasn't a failure.)

 

 

 _iv_.

Today he has to be in court.

This particular trial isn't one of the ones for fraud, but for child endangerment and abuse.

It's about drowning his dad. Or, really, making him think his dad drowned and it was his fault.

So far, being in court is a lot like having a deeply terrible nightmare where nothing quite happened but you felt sick anyway. It's a lot like before he realized his escape plan, when he knew everything was wrong but didn't have all the puzzle pieces for what to  _do_ about it yet.

He sits in the seat and waits, and then the prosecution calls his father to the stand.

(But it's not his dad at all. Nobody who knows has yet released the names of his mother and his father--his  _real_ mom and dad.)

"So, Mr. Moore, can you explain why you were asked to fake your own death via drowning at sea?"

"Well, it was another Christof idea. We were supposed to make sure the kid couldn't get out, but he was too curious. Sooner or later he'd want to travel or go on spring break somewhere else, and me and the directors kept having creative differences. So they decided to give him a fear of water so he'd never be able to leave."

"To clarify: the staff decided to deliberately traumatize Truman in order to more effectively imprison and defraud him?"

"Well, we didn't think of it like that. It was a TV show, and I was being sent off on a bus."

"Did you at any point object to this...creative decision?"

"I sure did," Dad says--no, Walter Moore says. Dad doesn't exist. Dad is long dead. "I was furious about losing my spot and breaking contract, but I wasn't part of the Guild and Christof was a right bastard. He didn't have the right, but I couldn't win. So I went along with the crappy storyline and played my part."

"So at no point you objected to making a child believe that his father had died horribly, right in front of his eyes?"

"Well, no, but you're making it sound a lot worse than it was," Moore says, and Truman can hear a ringing in his ears.

"So did you simply never consider the consequences of your actions?"

"I hated him," Moore ( _Dad_ ) spits out, and Truman feels like he's been dunked in cold water. "I hated the snotty little kid, and I hated my job. I didn't want to go out like that, in some melodramatic soap-opera plot, but I was glad to get away from him. Haven't been able to find work since."

Truman can't hear the rest at all. Dad didn't-- Dad always  _hated_ him? Dad  _wanted_ to die, to drown in that storm, just so he could get away from him?

(He wishes he could believe his parents loved him again.)

 

 

 _v_.

He starts to get a little  _neurotic_ by two years free.

Marlon still sends him letters, and he still finds out what's wrong with him all the time, and he still doesn't have any friends from his entire life. But worst of all is that he can't seem to have the same kind of routine anymore--yes, by the end it was too chafing, but for most of his life, things happened in a particular order and in a particular way. The twins were always on the verge of agreeing to the deal; the milk was always the same price at the store; he always had macaroni on Wednesdays and the dalmation always jumped on him. Things happened in the same ways every time, and now that nothing is routine he misses it a little. 

The world is so big and unpredictable that he starts to withdraw. He eats only the same three things every day: an egg for breakfast, on bread, a peanut butter and apple sandwich at lunch, with a bag of potato chips, and meatloaf with gravy and carrots for dinner. He stops being able to go out on drives with Sylvia unless they go at the same time to the same diner at night. He can't answer emails anymore unless they come from the same people every week. He has to check for cameras everywhere; he can't have closed cabinets or loose space under his bed.

Sylvia notices--how could she not? He starts wearing the same clothes every day, and before too long he can't seem to do  _anything_ spontaneous or fun. Strangers talking to him makes him scream and run away. He can't take classes online anymore.

It's not until he realizes he's only let himself watch the old TV shows and movies-- _I Love Lucy_ and  _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ \--that he cracks. He throws the TV out of the front window, and sits down on the floor and loses it.

Sylvia gets him a psychologist. She says they're not called analysts and they won't lock him up anywhere, but even just going to see one--even under disguise, and  _nobody's watching_ , not as far as he can tell--is bad enough.

No matter how bad thing got in there, he wasn't ever actually  _crazy_.

 

 

_+1_

Fiji is beautiful.

It's not where he lives now--that's Hong Kong. He also has a little apartment he rents out in Tokyo, but he and Sylvia prefer Hong Kong for its food and skylines, and their baby seems to do better here too. Her name is Danielle, because she was born in the lion's den of Hollywood (for the citizenship, his lawyers advised him), and she is perfect.

Truman can't imagine looking at anyone that tiny and hating them. He can't imagine looking anyone so innocent and trusting in their eyes and lying to them.

Danielle is safe and smart and brilliant; she's used to airplanes already and boats, looks out the window and cooes, babbling to them when she sees the sea. Truman has never loved anyone like he loves her, not with the all-encompassing protectiveness and the satisfaction of knowing that even if he dies tomorrow, he has helped make and take care of this tiny human, and that has made his life worthwhile.

(Not the fucking  _show_.)

Sylvia gets a lot of acting jobs here too, oddly enough, but few people recognize Truman. He's thought about acting, but thinks it's a bad plan, at least until Danielle's older. For now, he's a stay-at-home dad, cutting up fruit for her and making smoothies with her in the morning, kissing Sylvia goodbye and looking at her go from their huge apartment with windows so big he'd spot anyone coming from the outside.

Danielle is two, and this is her fifth time in Fiji, and she loves it too. She even stays up to watch the sunset, and there's no cue. It's just him and his daughter and his wife, sitting on a beach, drinking coconut water and looking at each other, safe and real and  _free_.

He's not even Truman anymore, not to other people. He goes by Alexander now, Alex to his friends and neighbors, and Sylvia calls him that when she's on her phone. The only people who call him Truman are his lawyers and fans, and he barely ever reads the latter's letters anymore.

He has better things to do. He's decided to get a degree in psychology, after he finishes one in computer coding. He's got job offers at several companies waiting for him to decide that he can work from home, and he has enough from the settlements and backpay and sympathy money to last a lifetime.

But most of it is in trusts and hidden accounts, and all for Danielle. Danielle, who falls asleep on his chest, who Truman can protect by not hiding her away in a fake world. Instead, he takes her everywhere with him, and by the time she's thirty maybe she'll want to settle in a little boring place because she'll have seen Fiji a thousand times by then, memorized Tokyo's subway maps and met everyone in Hong Kong. Maybe she'll have her own adventures--backpack across Europe or something, hike the Rockies.

But whatever she wants, Danielle will never be confined. Never have a raincloud just over her head. Never become the next star of the Truman show, never be seen on button cameras and recorded every second of her life. Truman knows he can protect her; he got  _himself_ out, and by then he had a thirty-year handicap, and he _still_ won.

He smiles and kisses her hair. Christof isn't dead yet, and he gets to live knowing that his artistic vision will never, ever come true.

Danielle isn't the only one who sleeps like a baby, these nights. 


End file.
